1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the retention of electronic mail (email). More particularly, the invention is directed to the management of distributed email content maintained on plural data sources.
2. Description of the Prior Art
By way of background, the retention and management of email content is critical in the corporate workplace and business market. However, with most enterprise email solutions being based on protocols and methods wherein the email resides on a network server, retaining large volumes of mail can degrade the mail server performance and consume significant amounts of server storage. One option for the long term email retention is to save local copies of the email to user workstations. Although this eases the burden of storing and serving email on the mail server, that same burden is now placed on the users to safely retain the email without the reliability of typical enterprise storage systems. The burden of consuming disk storage is also transferred to the users. In addition, users may retain their local email copies at plural storage locations, such as user workstation hard drives, plug-in or removable storage media, local area network-connected storage systems, or other local area network hosts. Some of these storage locations (such as removable storage) may not always be “online” and accessible to the user workstations. This further complicates email management and makes searching across the local email copies a difficult and time-consuming task.
It would be desirable to provide an email retention solution that eases the burden of email storage on the server, eases the burden of email storage on the user, and allows email content retained on plural storage devices to be efficiently managed. What is particularly needed is a solution that provides quick, searchable methods to scan all email content, regardless of its location, and even if the content is retained on offline data sources.